On October 10, 2019, Brown at Columbia hosted Stephanie Hankey for its inaugural 2019-2020 Distinguished Lecture in Computational Innovation. Stephanie Hankey is a designer, technologist, and social entrepreneur who has worked internationally at the intersection of technology and human rights for the past 20 years. She is the co-founder and Executive Director of Tactical Tech,
CategoryAudio/Video
A Science-Media Meetup
Last night, September 26, the Brown Institute hosted a group of journalism and science students for an evening of collaboration. We began with a panel led by Ros Donald, a PhD student at the Journalism School studying communication of climate change in Miami. Before beginning her PhD she was deputy editor of Carbon Brief, a
Frameworks for Predicting the Next Big Trends in Tech
Industry-shifting opportunities come along about every five-to-ten years. In this Sept. 24th conversation at Stanford, Ceci Stallsmith, Slack’s Director of Platform Marketing, outlined her methodology for detecting platform shifts before it’s too late to jump on a trend. Given that the media industry is incredibly trend-driven and that the impact of innovation seems
Distributed Media Labs, with Dave Gehring and Sam Parnell
Dave Gehring and Sam Parnell, CEO and CTO of Distributed Media Labs, explain how they hope to give publishers the opportunity to grow audience and deepen engagement across the open web through a new platform and information architecture that enables a standard for content distribution across the web. (Illustration: thanks to Stanford DCI Fellow Joseph
Jeff Larson introduces The Markup
Jeff Larson, Managing Editor of The Markup, explains how this new nonprofit news start-up plans to investigate how powerful institutions are using technology in ways that impact people and society. “Whether that is reshaping the news we get and what we believe; how elections play out; our jobs and how we get them; how we
The NYT’s Kevin Quealy on Innovating with Data & Graphics
Kevin Quealy discusses how The New York Times thinks about data visualization and graphics. Quealy is the Deputy Editor at The Upshot, the Times’s site on politics, economics, and everyday life. The goal of The Upshot, he says, is to use data and graphics effectively and “turn readers into experts.”
‘Hacking Voter Suppression’ Project Begins
For the 2018-19 Magic Grant Season, the Brown Institute at Columbia is funding Hacking Voter Suppression, a project by Columbia Journalism School Professor June Cross and Charlotte Braithwaite, a Theater Director and Assistant Professor of Music and Theater Arts at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The project seeks to explore how foreign interference, gerrymandering, and
Twitch 4 News? The Washington Post’s Phoebe Connelly tells us more
Washington Post Deputy Video Editor Phoebe Connelly joined Twitch’s Cody Conners to explain how the paper is using the live- streaming platform for news. Testing the concept of a “Post Twitch channel” with Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony before Congress, the Post discovered that Twitch – typically frequented by video-gamers – provides an interesting space for analysis
Rethinking Tech, Ethics, and Democracy with MIT Tech Review’s Gideon Lichfield
In this conversation, Gideon Lichfield, Editor-in-Chief is the MIT Technology Review, explores issues raised in the Review’s fall issue: “Technology is threatening our democracy: How do we save it?” Lichfield also unpacks the Review’s new mission statement: “To bring about better informed and more conscious decisions about technology … we think it is no longer